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SunGard Offers IaaS For E-discovery App

Interest in e-discovery as a managed or hosted service shows no signs of abating. In the latest data point, ZL Technologies, which offers e-discovery, has tapped SunGard Availability Services for hosting and managed services. SunGard now supports ZL’s Unified Archive production applications, which include e-discovery, regulatory compliance, and data archiving. SunGard offers its virtual private data centers along with such managed services as monitoring, patching, backup, maintenance, and trouble resolution, according to the company.

SunGard, essentially, lets ZL provide its applications on a software-as-a-service basis. The on-demand nature of SaaS seems to to dovetail with e-discovery, where corporate legal teams must periodically spin up processing capability to deal with litigation. The cost and management overhead of building an in-house e-discovery center may not be worth the effort for companies only occasionally hit with lawsuits.

Beyond ZL, e-discovery software vendors such as kCura and Lateral Data also cultivate ties with hosting and managed services providers.

E-discovery and the related area of regulatory compliance hold a lot of promise for MSPs. Those activities are compulsory for many businesses, involve vast amounts of data, and are sufficiently burdensome to invite outsourcing. The opportunity seems geared toward two types of companies: managed hosting providers who can provide infrastructure as a service to support e-discovery apps and managed services providers who, in addition to technology services, offer litigation support expertise. D4 LLC, for example, provides a case management team of attorneys and paralegals as part of its managed services offering.